“Good Conservatives”: Exclusion in Action
We’re often told that not all conservatives are racist. We’re told that there are good and decent people who vote for the current felon in the White House. I would argue that. I have my own personal credo about racists.
I believe racism is on a spectrum (and no, not directly comparable to autism; I’ve never known an autistic person who was intentionally cruel), yet I know that there has been a longstanding attempt to define it at its most extreme white-robed, cross-burning self in order to overlook the everyday racism minorities face pretty much on a daily basis.
Most of us are unlikely to meet a Klan Grand Dragon or the head of a Proud Boys chapter, but microaggressions, like following us around in stores or ignoring our credentials in order to call us DEI or Affirmative Action hires, for example, are the types of everyday racism that wear us down.
But that’s not the point of my current narrative. I recently got a tiny glimpse into how “decent and good” church-going white conservatives are able to ignore historic and current racial realities. It’s smooth, it’s effective, it’s deadly. Here’s how it goes.
The USA is having an anniversary soon. The semiquincentennial (250th year) birthday of the Declaration of Independence is coming up in 2026. In honor of that, a white male professor emeritus of the local university history department is organizing a series of events and essays on the theme e pluribus unum. Each event is intended to exemplify some aspect of unity. The essays, published online, feature local organizations that have contributed to community unity. The finale will be a big concert of patriotic music.
Sounds good, right?
I got involved through connections. I play principal flute/piccolo in a community wind ensemble full of pro- and semi-pro musicians, many of whom are retired military band members. We’ll be playing the finale performance. The director, a white man who met his first black person when he joined the US army as an adult, knows I write. In fact, he’s asked me to write about the group in the past. So he asked if I’d write the essay on our group. I said “yes.”
Once I was onboard I got access to the list of groups that would be included. The list was extensive, about forty groups. Not one was a predominantly minority group, not one. Because we’re near a military base and have a lot of military retirees who traveled and married abroad, we’re far more diverse than the normal red-state town.
We have more Mexican, Asian, and Indian restaurants that some major cities in the state, so I couldn’t understand it. We have a Chinese Club, a Hispanic Family Foundation, a Korean-American Association, not to mention the NAACP, but an actual history professor could envision American unity without a single minority group.
I remembered the first year of desegregation where I was the only black child in the top English class taught by the stereotype of a Southern spinster. She could not bear to call on me or even look at me. There was nothing I could do, but as Dad said “keep raising your hand.” So here we are decades and decades and decades later, as the military says SNAFU*
But I’m grown now, craftier. I couldn’t fix everything, but I could fix this. After all, my mom had been an award-winning lifetime member of the local NAACP chapter.
So I girded my mental loins with good ol’ Southern sweetness: “I’m so glad you’re doing this service to the community. There’s so much involved that I imagine it’s just an oversight, but I notice the NAACP is not on your list. They’ve contributed so much to the unity here, especially during desegregation.”
I took a breath, re-tuned my melodic sentences, and added, “I’m willing to pitch in by contacting them and working with them to produce an essay, if that’s okay with you,” I drawled.
Inside, I was smirking. I know how everyday racism works. Like Miss Riggins, they’d prefer to ignore us, pretending we and racism don’t exist, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. But I’d pointed out their lapse. I’d subtly blamed them without overtly blaming them. I’d shown their backside without getting their backs up.
The professor guy couldn’t say “No” without looking racist, plus he knew me, he’d heard me play at patriotic events and at small meetings. He knew I’d been a professor too. He knew it was unlikely that I’d get “loud” or “show out.” As discomfort goes, I was an acceptable risk.
So I wrote my essay on unity and the NAACP. Mine was the third of the series to be published. The editor thanked and congratulated me. But then I noticed something else. As my mother would have said “can’t win for losing.”
The series intro article listed seventeen anticipated public readings and performances. All the readers/speakers/directors were white. Only one solo speaker was female. And nobody, as the old spiritual goes, had “said a mumblin’ word.”
And the exclusion went even farther. One of the groups on the original essay list was the Daughters of the American Revolution. That name set off alarm bells for me. But let me first tell you what they said:
The DAR does lots of good works. One of the best is to supply a set of books for each family moving into a Habitat for Humanity home.
What a lovely idea. But they speak of their inclusiveness, noting that any woman over the age of eighteen who can prove her connection to an important figure in the Revolutionary War era is welcomed. Hmmm.
That ignores the fact that records were rarely kept for people of color, especially around the time of their founding in 1890. It also ignores the fact that one reason those records were not kept was because hospitals rarely served black citizens in the Jim Crow era.
They also overlook the fact that the DAR was the organization that denied famed African American mezzo soprano Marian Anderson the opportunity to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington DC, seat of the government purportedly representing freedom, liberty, and equality. The DAR’s rejection of Anderson, the first black woman to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, led to her legendary performance outdoors on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Does the DAR ever mention that? That history professor guy once said that you don’t mention someone’s warts on their birthday. Let’s put aside, for the moment, the fact that the history of my existence is considered to be a wart. I countered him. Publicly.
I told an audience that my presence and participation in the community was living proof of the progress that had been made. I told them that we should celebrate that progress as an indication of American greatness — acknowledging a problem and working to resolve it. The mostly white audience clapped and nodded.
But white history guy shows how they do it, how they ignore historic and current racial realities. They pretend they are, and must be, the default for American life. They prefer to ignore our existence. America, they say to themselves, is only great without us. They want to wipe out huge sins of days gone by. Enslaving of Africans, gifting smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans, interning Japanese Americans, and other travesties of liberties can simply be overlooked.
That’s how they can vote for a racist, but say they “don’t have a racist bone” in their bodies.
That’s how they can vote for a felon, but call themselves law-abiding.
That’s how they can vote for a lying adulterer, but call themselves Christian.
That’s how they can vote for the instigator of a coup who stole classified documents and call themselves patriots.
They simply block out any “unpleasantness.”
But it’s different for me. I consider our past tragedies as indicating the power and resilience of the American dream of freedom and justice for all. Africans were once enslaved; now we’re free. Women couldn’t vote; now we can. Indigenous American children were taken from their homes and forced into cruel residential schools; now an American president has publicly apologized. We’re not perfect, but despite all kinds of roadblocks and societal IEDs, our relentless march toward a level of justice the founding fathers only dreamed of represents ongoing greatness. We should celebrate that.
*SNAFU = status normal, all fucked up
